Show HN: Kody Tools – I developed 300 tools in 6 months | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kody Tools – I developed 300 tools in 6 months

kodytools.com

151 pointsKodyBerns9979 comments

This is just a side hustle but I ended developing 300+ tools. Any feedback or suggestion is welcome.

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For many of these manipulations, I use https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ which lets you pipe them together.

great, I did not know about it.

Discussed 1 year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29982286 (54 comments)

Full source code is here:

https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef

A small detail that you can improve UX would be to ensure that the button to execute a task is focused when you hit the tab key. In some of your tools I need to hit the tab key two or three times until I get to the execute/do button. Usually the delete and copy buttons are focused first. I would believe most people want to just enter their payload hit tab and enter and get their result... As mentioned this is a small detail, great work overall!

Thanks for the feedback, will keep that in mind.

There used to be a programmers calculator who's proper name I forgot with most of these as a part of it.

I assume this was a programming experiment, so congratulations for pulling through.

I'm generally not a fan of these sensationalist titles though.

Thanks for appreciating

What’s sensationalist about the title? Maybe the title changed but it seems pretty accurate to me

Nothing sensationalist about the title.

I love this! I can't believe there hasn't been anything even close to this before. Usually, sites that have even one or two of the converters (such as the base64 ones) are riddled with ads or just low-quality.

Thank you, it means a lot

Check out CyberChef[0] which is the benchmark for these types of tools. The OPs one has way more conversions but CyberChef has some really cool features like brute forcing variants of tools and content type detection, as well as piping tools into each other.

[0] https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

Excellent work! Simple, searchable, well documented. The tiniest of nits: the options on the right side of the page let you see a category of tools, but there isn't an option to see all tools again

All tools are listed on front page in alphabetical order.

It might be a bit more intuitive if the tools header took you back to the main page.

Surely, will do it by today. I just noted it.

Thanks for changing!

Yep, but once you select a category, there's no button on the page that shows you all the tools again. The "Tools" header looks like a link but isn't one. If you made that a link too, then you could click that to get back to the home page.

Thanks for the feedback. I will do it by today. Currently, just clicking on logo will take you to home page.

Still very much a WIP, but I created a similar project where you can create your own.

https://texttransform.io/

@kodyberns I'd love to collab!

Nice work! Bookmarked. Any plans to add openssl tools? I keep finding myself needing to convert x509 certs to text, and of course there is the never ending question of how do I generate my own SSL certificates. I guess it would be awesome if many of the most frequent questions on StackOverflow had a "kody tool" answer. I'm saying this because I think many conceivably could.

sure, I am always open to suggestions. I will keep note of your request.

Since creating TLS certificates involves also creating a private key, wouldn't you want to do this on your own hardware and not trust a third-party with your key?

These tools seem to work on the client side with JS as far as I can from the response time. (Check source to be sure)

That depends on the intended application of those certificates. I was only thinking of local development with self-signed certificates that would never be used in production. But yes, I see your point. Some users may not realize the security risk when using an online tool like this and use it for production certificates as well.

It’s possible to do this client-side in the browser.

This is great. I really like the idea of gathering a bunch of one’s own tools together under a single web page like this - for visibility, for convenience, and to give you the freedom to quickly add GUI elements like graphs.

Not a web dev though. Kody, could you talk a bit about what libraries or framework you used for the front end here?

Thanks for the feedback, i have used Next JS and Material UI.

Your HTML to Markdown is pretty off.

<ul>

  <li>List1</li>

</ul>

Gets converted to

Test

====

Test2

-----

### Test3

* List1

When it should be

# Test

## Test2

### Test3

• List1

EDIT: Actually looking more into it it seems it's just using more uncommon ways of doing headers. Guess I didn't know about the alternate methods

Thanks for the feedback, I have updated it.

Nice work. You might wanna add a simple explainer text in the tool page, it would help understand some of them by the uninitiated (chaldean numerology?) and would probably help indexing too :)

That is next in the todo list to add some content. I have done it for 60 tools and doing for others one by one.

Great work Kody! Thanks.

One thing I was hoping to see—-remove MS Word induced junk like “Smart quotes” and “smart apostrophes” and whatever else tends to blow up web text when importing or displaying.

Sure, will add it to my todo list.

This is great!

A tiny, insignificant piece of feedback: if I’m searching and there’s only one result, can Return automatically pick that one? Or maybe just the top result.

Thanks for the feedback, will keep note of it.

> HTML to PHP Converter

> literally wraps the entire input in a single echo()

I don't know what else I expected, but what on earth would be the point of this tool?

I thought the same and did not plan on adding it. But then I did a search on google, I took the idea from similar sort of tools available online and people are using them. As you said, it is just spitting html in string format.

The IRR calculator % formatting is wrong.

Original: [1000], Flows: [100, 200, 900] Shows: 0.07%, should be: 7.11%

Thanks for the feedback, will definitely update it by tomorrow.

Just updated, now its working as expected.

Congrats and thank you for building this! Awesome project and the site is snappy fast.

Thanks for appreciation.

not sure how to pull it off, but I think left-aligned tool names would help for readability, the search is helpful

also a tabbed/categorized view where the tools are grouped by use/topic (guess that's the bit on the right)

Thanks for the feedback.

Do you have any contact information? I couldn't find any on your site.

you can contact me on twitter - @kodyberns

I post project updates on daily basis.

Is it all web based or a web interface to command line tools?

All are web based.

Nice work. How about X12 to XML and X12 to JSON?

Sure, will add it to the todo list.

... that is good use of stack overflow

impressive, implementing all this would come with a lot of learning and skill development

Thanks for appreciating. I really worked on it.

well for most of those tools, it exists npm packages making it quite easy to implement. And even from scratch, it's not that hard. For me this project rather demonstrate the patience and determination of the author, putting in place all those tools in a nice and accessible way.

More versatile and polished: https://10015.io

That’s a bit too “polished” for me. I like how the OP has the tools all listed on the home page instead of buried under a bunch of “glamor” that causes the tools and information to be less dense.

Are these tools opensourced?

Great, thank you, bookmarked

thanks

Are you unemployed or millionaire?

I think this an insensitive comment. I don't know if you meant it that way, but if so well. You know :)

In either case whether the OP is unemployed or a millionaire this takes dedication and hard work and it's an amazing amount of work so good for them!

Thanks for the support, I think he meant how someone can spare so much time in creating them.

Sorry, I don't meant to be insensitive.

Its okay, I think you said it in humor

It was a hobby project to have some tools of my own, but once I started... every day a new idea for a tool started popping up and I kept creating one after another

I know this feeling. I have gone down similar rabbit hole once too; and it was fun, relaxing and act as a stress buster for me. Thanks for sharing these.

It's very cool, but nothing drove you aside of that? Did you think it would bring you prestige, etc.? Did something else than the joy of coding keep you going?

https://justforfunnoreally.dev/

a) I wasn’t asking you, I was asking OP

b) That page is condescending af; I am a hacker too, and even if I wasn’t, it would still be condescending af. Rather idiotic, too, as it assumes that asking about the motive for building something is a bad question, when in fact many hackers may have perfectly good reasons (learning, self-promotion, profit, etc) to build something other than just for the fun of it.

I really dont know how to explain this, but once I started I never thought of stopping. I felt like Tom Hanks of Forrest Gump who was just running and running..

I really enjoyed creating those tools and for surely, I will create more.

Some people try and combine the utility of tools, experience and portfolio increases with the ever decreased effort and investment given by focused intent. Science of optimization (wonder where optimization experts may gather?)

Could be a weekend hobby -- 12 per weekend. Still, good dedication!

Yes, but sometimes I ended up making just one because things sometimes dont go as per plan.

I imagine OP might create a tonne of tools in coming days now that ChatGPT can help in writing code.

for Sure, will create a lot of them.

How much productivity gains do you think one sees from using ChatGPT in semi-serious coding? Like, how much time do you think one can save out of, say, a six-hour coding session, on average?

I save maybe 10 minutes an hour with Github Copilot. Especially when writing tests, it will auto complete things like 'I expect these two numbers to sum to X' , except those numbers are buried in a list in an object, but somehow it creates the correct sum , that I use for the expected value. The danger is, sometimes it just creates completely wrong code, and you have to diligently be checking its generated output. They should maybe include accuracy ratings with the suggestions.

Yes I save similar amounts, and I have the same issues. The thing is at 10 minutes per hour saved, OP would have taken 5 months instead of 6 to build the 300 tools. Fantastic productivity gains and I’ll take them any time of day, but the tools would’ve hardly written themselves.

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